“Grab her now. She gone faint.” Analee had gone into action, Alice already at her side.
Together they managed to get Constance into the chair before she collapsed. Analee positioned her head low as Alice picked up the fallen paper, examined it.
“What is this?”
“That the Black Hand, Miss Alice. They bad. They’ll kill you fore they think about it.”
Constance, lifting her torso, had the impulse to stop Alice as she examined the soiled paper, the ragged script.
Dead or not, Benton Halstead owes $3500. You will pay it. Or lose again.
Or lose again? The children?
Beneath the words was an imprint of the Black Hand.
*
Sergeant Pulgrum took the note and studied it. Flipped it over, then back, and laid it on the desk “You received this when? And how?”
Constance glanced from Pulgrum to Alice, then back. She repeated the fragments of her story, pulling the words together like the torn, waterlogged bits of the note found on Benton’s body.
“They will take my children. I must pay them. I will have to. You said the police were on this, but nothing has happened. You know they kidnap children. They bomb people. They kill—”
“Now, now, Mrs. Halstead. Slowly. Please.”
“You know it. They do. I have to pay them so they will leave me alone, leave my children alone!”
“Mrs. Halstead.” Pulgrum propped himself on the edge of his desk, facing her, elbow on his knee, his hands clasped in front, one index finger extended. “Mrs. Halstead, if you pay, they will be back for more. I believe this is already more than your husband’s gambling debt. I can’t be sure. But I think it likely. We have information, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.” Constance felt anger rising. She could not afford to lose her temper with this man. He was her only thread to safety, however fragile. “My children are in danger, Sergeant Pulgrum. I know you know more than you are telling me. I know that nothing has been done. I know my husband has been—” She stopped herself. What was she about to say? She took a breath and shook her lowered head.
“Yes, I know, Mrs. Halstead.”
He knew what? She wanted to scream. Kick the desk. Smash his blue paperweight through the window. She wanted to rip apart that married name that was not her, not now, not ever. Trembling, she waved her hand, palm down, with a sense of utter uselessness and felt the clasp of Alice’s steady grip.
“Mrs. Halstead.”
Constance braced herself.
“We are going to put a guard on your house round the clock, beginning now, until we have this situation under control. I am asking you not to pay these criminals. They will only come back for more.” Pulgrum sat upright. “We’ve seen them in action before. If they believe they can make you pay, they up the ante. It’s a given.” Pulgrum leaned toward her again.
Constance sensed his shift and raised herself to face him.
“The men they send on their errands are penny ante, Mrs. Halstead, expendable. The higher-ups don’t give a fig if their errand boys get caught. Or killed. They just chalk that up as the price of business. You are not the one who owed them. But if you pay them, then they will know they have you hooked, and they will come again. We know the pattern.”
Constance saw that he was studying her. He wanted to see that she was hearing. She wanted to trust him but could not override her fear. She wanted reassurance.
“We have seen this repeatedly, Mrs. Halstead.”
She sat straighter, Alice’s hand on her shoulder.
“Yes, they kill people, they bomb, they kidnap children, but there is a pattern. Men who owe them and will not, do not pay quite often die. The bombs are a whole other thing, more for politics and threats. They don’t usually kidnap children, unless they are trying to extort money from a man of wealth. I will be frank, Mrs. Halstead. You do not fit their pattern. You are simply convenient. Your husband owed them, and—I’m sorry—he is dead. They know you have a trust of your own that Mr. Halstead could never touch. They are trying to terrify you into paying them. If they find they can, you become their mark for more.”
Constance took a deep breath. She studied his face for a moment, hiccupped, and gave a faint nod.
“You understand me now?”
“Yes.”
“You will not give them any payment?”
“No.”
“They gave you directions in this note. We are going to follow these directions exactly. Except that we will have plainclothes police deliver. Then we will have their errand boy, and they will go to something else. Is that clear to you?”
Constance glanced at Alice, felt the squeeze of her hand. She nodded.
*
Unable to sleep, Constance rose and laid her hand on the window sash, her head on her hand, and rocked her forehead back and forth. With a heavy sigh, she sat down on the edge of the chaise and faced the darkness. How can this possibly be true? she thought. What did I do to find myself in this nightmare?
After falling back onto the chaise, toes still touching the floor, Constance ran her fingers over the layered texture of the upholstery. She had wanted such a simple life, what she envisioned as typical, without drama: husband, children, a garden, some friends, suitable spouses for her children, more children, walks in the evening, holding hands and laughing. She knew such things were not, in fact, typical. She had grown up with her own parents, for heaven’s sake. She had witnessed hints of the various dramas in friends’ households, though no one had alluded to them. Yet somehow she had absorbed that fairy-tale ending of “happily ever after” as the beginning of actual adult life.
She had grown, developed a meagre bosom, and gotten her first blood early. Though she had never been able to see it in her own mirror, she had known that others considered her fair, if not actually pretty. Neither parent had commented on her appearance, except to tell her to stand up straight or tuck in a loose hair; to call attention to a scuff on her shoe and instruct her to leave the pair at the foot of the stairs to be polished; to drill her to get up from the table and wash her hands before dinner. And why did they have to remind her every time? Her mother might make an observation or two to the seamstress when clothing was fitted: “Can we do a bit extra here to enhance the bosom? And I know the bustles are smaller now, but perhaps just a tad of unobtrusive padding here about the hips? There, that will help.” And to her: “You simply need another year or two—and a baby or two—and you will round out nicely. Don’t you worry.” And she didn’t. It wasn’t she who worried, though she was almost as straight up and down as a boy. She was keenly aware of the hourglass figures of young women around her, but she was far too lost in her books to care much, except when keenly aware of her mother’s concern in public.
Constance arrived at womanhood well read, skilled in reciting certain poems, adequate on the piano, as long as the piece was one she had memorized. And quiet. Responding with a certain light wit, but with care not to focus attention on herself, while the gentlemen conversed on politics or the weather. She was adequate with the steps of the quadrille and knew how to bake an excellent hen, with just the right mix of seasonings, none too heavy handed.
Into the complexity of her simplified life had stepped Benton Halstead. She remembered her first glimpse of him. Someone—she had no memory who—had been playing the harmonica while she fingered her way through “Auld Lang Syne” on the eve of the New Year, 1895. When she played the last chord and the lingering trill of the harmonica died, she scooted to the end of the piano bench to find him leaning toward her, his hand out to assist her rising. The smile on his face almost alarmed her; she couldn’t for the life of her have said why. Yes, alarmed her and disarmed her. No other gentleman had yet been quite so forward. When she did not take his hand, he tucked it into his waist and offered his elbow. That she felt a chaste enough gesture to accept, and she did, then walked to the punch table as he sang the words from one of the verses, just loud enough for her to hear: